Welcome to Apnea Board ! As a guest, you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. To post a message, you must create a free account using a valid email address.
Login or Create an Account

My therapy seems to be working quite well though that day where I wake up and feel WOW is yet to arrive. That said I wake up feeling a lot sharper than I used to and it's only the tiredness later in the day that still needs work.

I look at my data every day and wondered how to interpret flow rate. Last nights graph seems spiky yet uniform. Is this what it should be or should it be smoother?

Your flow limitation graphs' spikes are actually quite low for the most part. My guess is that if you zoom in on flow rate to the point where you can see the individual breaths that you will have a hard time seeing any visual difference between the breaths near the peaks in the "flow limitation" graph and the other breaths. As a result, I'd be inclined to ignore the flow limitations as long as the spikes are this low.

Quote:My therapy seems to be working quite well though that day where I wake up and feel WOW is yet to arrive. That said I wake up feeling a lot sharper than I used to and it's only the tiredness later in the day that still needs work.

Some of us never wake up feeling WOW. But over the course of weeks and months, the usual way we feel when we wake up becomes significantly better. It's just that the rate of improvement is subtle enough that we don't realize that we are feeling a whole lot better than we used to. Unless something happens and we have to go for part of the night or all of the night without the PAP and we wake up in the morning feeling the way we used to feel every day. And at that point we say: "WOW, I can't believe I used to think feeling this bad was normal."

I am not sure how spiky and uniform fit the same graph unless you meant uniformly spiky. Sorry, I could not resist that.

My experience is that less spiky is generally better. If one were to poll the people that get significant numbers of AHI=0, I would almost bet that their flow data has very little spikeyness but I could easily be wrong.

It's interesting how far you have progressed using the Resmed S9 Autoset as compared to older data with the F&P CPAP at generally comperable pressures. At the current zoom level, there is very little to say about the flow data. You have made steady progress in results without any remarkable changes in setting pressures. I think you can look forward to continued improvement, but may also see some setbacks. Sometimes, it just takes time to adapt to the therapy, and you have done that. Plenty of people get frustrated and quit.

I suggest backing off on your data monitoring some. From this point, you want to look at longer term trends and daily monitoring of the data will not help you do that. There will be good days and some that are not so good. You have your settings pretty well dialed in and it can be tempting to have a knee-jerk reaction to a bad day. Overall this is effective with room for improvement. Snore and flow limitation is at low levels, and you have some hypopnea that may or may not respond to a slight minimum pressure increase. If you increase EPR, I would recommend increasing minimum pressure by the same amount. The "pressure support" may help reduce hypopnea events, but not if it comes at the price of a lower minimum EPAP pressure.

Thanks for the reassurance about Flow Level and other things. I'm a bit OCD regarding making improvements and I suppose I'm applying this to my therapy. I coach swimming and I'm sure the kids sometimes curse this part of my nature - the kaizen principle of gradual improvement. However, when they make it to State championships in strokes they didn't expect too (not an easy feat here in QLD) they see the benefits and accept that this works.

However, all I'm going to do from now on is look briefly at the figures on the machine as I get up each morning.

Useful Links

INFORMATION ON APNEA BOARD FORUMS OR ON APNEABOARD.COM SHOULD NOT BE CONSIDERED AS MEDICAL ADVICE. ALWAYS SEEK THE ADVICE OF A PHYSICIAN BEFORE SEEKING TREATMENT FOR MEDICAL CONDITIONS, INCLUDING SLEEP APNEA. INFORMATION POSTED ON THE APNEA BOARD WEB SITE AND FORUMS ARE PERSONAL OPINION ONLY AND NOT NECESSARILY A STATEMENT OF FACT.